Scorn of the abstract: favoring contextualized thinking over more abstract, though more relevant, matters. The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.
Robust is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who dislike it (artists); fragile when you care more about the few who dislike your work than the multitude who like it...
Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This inverse proble...
Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all … just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches. For revolutions feed on repression, growin...
Remember that you are a Black Swan.
Recognition can be quite a pump. Believe me, even those who genuinely claim that they do not believe in recognition, that they separate labor from the fruits of labor, actually get a serotonin kick fr...
Questo stimolo all’acquisto di cose nuove che sono destinate a perdere le loro caratteristiche di novità, soprattutto se paragonate a quelle ancora più nuove, viene definito effetto tapis roulant (tre...
Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving.
Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.
Psychologists and economists who study irrationality do not realize that humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger. I do not procrastinate when I see a lion entering...
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with o...
People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.
Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction.
Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the...
Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotio...
Our aversion to variability and desire for order, and our acting on those feelings, have helped precipitate severe crises. Making something artificially bigger (instead of letting it die early if it c...
Or take the health category. Adding is on the left, removing to the right. Removing medication, or some other unnatural stressor—say, gluten, fructose, tranquilizers, nail polish, or some such substan...
One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually recognize the writing of another but that...
One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker
Now for reasons that have to do with the increase of the artificial, the move away from ancestral and natural models, and the loss in robustness owing to complications in the design of everything, the...